I have been traveling the world as a journalist and passionate lover of all things fun for 20 years. I have had weekly columns in USA Today and Investors Business Daily, published thousands of articles in leading magazines from Playboy to Popular Science, and am the author of Getting Into Guinness. I am the Contributing Travel Editor for Cigar Aficionado Magazine, the restaurant columnist for USAToday.com, and am a co-founder of TheAPosition.com, the leading golf travel website. I love every kind of travel, active, cultural and leisurely, and my special areas of expertise are luxury hotels and resorts, golf, skiing, food, wine and spirits. I tweet @TravelFoodGuy

Hotel Test Drive: First Look At Nobu Hotel Las Vegas

The brand new Nobu Hotel Las Vegas is the second, shorter tower from the right within the vast Caesars Palace casino resort.

Earlier this year I wrote about the much-anticipated upcoming opening of the world’s first Nobu Hotel (several others are in the works, from Miami to Dubai), inside Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. With the possible exception of the under-construction Linq Resort, compete with an London Eye-style giant observation wheel, scheduled to open on the Strip in December, the Nobu Hotel Las Vegas is easily the biggest lodging event of the year in one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, which instantly makes it big travel news.

In my last piece I promised an early review of the property and the time has come. On February 2, Chef Nobu Matsuhisa cut the ribbon with a samurai sword while his business partner in Nobu Hospitality Group, Oscar-winning actor Robert DeNiro, looked on. The hotel opened eight days ago, on Sunday February 3, and I was one of the first guests, having just spent four nights there. The official grand opening will not be until April 28, and the top of the line suites are not finished yet, but the vast majority of the guest rooms are (it was over 70% occupancy last weekend), along with the restaurant and dedicated staff. In fact, considering that most hotels, even the best run, go through a lot of problems right after opening, I’d say Nobu Hotel did surprisingly well and is definitely ready for prime time.

Miso black cod is one of the beloved signature dishes at Nobu Matsuhisa's restaurants.

First I’ll look at the physical hotel. It used to be the Centurion Tower, one of six hotel towers that along with a huge mall, dozens of restaurants, several casinos, a performing arts center, race & sports book, poker room, vast pool complex, huge spa, and much more comprise the enormous Caesars Palace casino resort. The Nobu concept is a separate luxury hotel within the larger resort, an idea that is not new to Las Vegas, but here everything tends to run huge, and even “boutique” hotels are larger than most normal hotels elsewhere. This is not the case with Nobu, which is quite intimate by local standards with just 181 rooms – out of nearly 4,000 within Caesars.

The building looks unchanged from the Strip, just another squat, white, nondescript square tower rising from behind the Roman façade. But the interior was gutted and the rooms are radically different from any in Caesars – or any in Vegas. They are larger than normal standard rooms, with a sitting area with L-shaped couch and coffee table beyond the main sleeping area. The design style is very much Asian, with the bed and furniture low to the ground, all sleek surfaces of black lacquered furniture, wood and leather, and the carpeting is textured to resemble the rake lines in a sandy zen garden. The art is also Asian, a mix of traditional Japanese woodblock prints and much more contemporary works. But the best thing about the rooms are the lavish bathrooms. Each has a vastly oversized shower, roughly twice the size of the walk-in shower that has become de rigueur at luxury hotels like Four Seasons. The huge shower has a great rain showerhead, separate handheld shower, and is built of imported Japanese black tile, with a traditional teak stool like you would find in a Japanese bathhouse in case you want to take a load off and rest up while washing. The toiletries are strictly first class, NaturaBisse from Barcelona, and like top luxury hotels in Tokyo the range of items is far greater than in typical U.S. hotels, complete with razors, shaving cream, dental kit and the like.

The showers, of black Japanese tile, are huge, roughly double most luxury hotel walk in showers.

While there is a big emphasis on the visual appeal of the room, it is functional as well, alleviating many of the pet peeves I have about hotel rooms. All the lights and lamps are easy to locate and operate, and there are outlets everywhere, including a charging and input center below the nicely framed large flatscreen for power, charging Apple/USB devices, and sending video or music to the TV. There is an outlet on each of the three lamps around the bed and it’s hard to imagine running out of space no matter how many things you need to charge. The minibar picks up the Asian theme with a selection of high end sakes, Japanese beers and exotic juices.

Other special amenities include 24-hour room service from the Nobu restaurant downstairs, with custom menu items you can’t get anyplace else – and it’s the only Nobu that serves breakfast, for in-room guests only. Guests share Caesar’s extravagant and award winning QUA Baths & Spa, but they have developed special treatments just for the Nobu Hotel. One creative touch: immediately after check in, a complimentary tea service is delivered to your room with green tea and a special rice cracker that has been imported from Nobu’s hometown in Japan, a nice welcome that helps set the mood.

Security minded guests will love the unique elevator system, one I have never seen in any hotel. Optical scanners read your key before letting you call an elevator (unlike those that require the key once you get in) and you select your floor before entering. Once inside, the elevators have no buttons except open, close and help and there is no way to get to the various floors without a key.

Nobu's creative take on "bagels and lox" is one of the special 24-hour room service items created exclusively for guests of the new hotel.

As much as I liked the rooms themselves, my favorite thing about the hotel was how it manages to pull off a true Vegas dichotomy. It is literally smack in the middle of the action, with its small lobby in the beating heart of Caesar’s, next to the longstanding and iconic Cleopatra’s Barge bar, just steps from Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill, the new Gordon Ramsay Bar & Grill, several bars, a nightclub, more restaurants, two casinos, the sports book, theater, and main lobby, any of these can be reached from your room easily in less than five minutes. But at the same time, the moment you enter the hotel it is an oasis of calm in the eye of the storm, a true escape from the non-stop craziness that is Las Vegas. Previous attempts at more luxurious hotels within the hotels here have focused on separate driveways and arrival lobbies, which makes sense because guests don’t have to face sometimes long lines for cabs and valet parking, but the downside is that guests at these hotels often feel like they are staying away from the action they came for, or off to the side. Nobu Hotel has it both ways, with incredible access coupled with escapism.

One of my least favorite things about almost all Vegas hotels, including Caesars, is their daily inability to deal with the massive number of people checking in or out at any given time. It is common, even at so called 4-Diamond hotels here, to wait on an airport-like line for half an hour or more to check-in, and then routine for your luggage to take 30-60 minutes to reach your room, something I find just as unacceptable as Vegas hotels find it normal. But Nobu has its own dedicated bell staff and even though I arrived by cab and left my bags in the maelstrom of the Caesars main entrance, when I checked in there was no wait at the desk in the hotel’s private lobby, zero, and they dispatched one of their bellman to go seize my luggage, which arrived in the room less than five minutes after me. When I checked out it was even faster – the bellman came within a two minutes of my call. This might not sound surprising at, say, the Peninsula Hong Kong, but in Vegas this kind of bell service is more miraculous than David Copperfield making an elephant disappear. One other decidedly un-Vegas touch I loved was the fact that there are relatively few rooms on each floor, which means no 15-minute walks down endless corridors to reach your room, another frustrating but business as usual fact of life here.

Caesars Palace has one of the top spas in Vegas, QUA, and special treatments were created for guests of the Nobu Hotel.

The final piece of the puzzle is the restaurant, the largest of the 20+ Nobus in the world, with preferential seating for hotel guests. I am a big fan of Matsuhisa’s cuisine, including his signature dishes, rock shrimp tempura, miso black cod and yellowtail sashimi with thin sliced jalapeño peppers. But some foodies find it too standardized, with most Nobus featuring largely the same menu. Not here. They have all these classics of course, but also several dishes and variants on the norms, such as the option to have the rock shrimp tempura in a spicy sauce over a bed of micro-greens. They also have two teppanyaki grill tables, unknown in other Nobus, and for each they offer a variety of set menus that include not just the traditional grilled meat or seafood and vegetables but also mix these with dishes prepared in the kitchen, for a teppanyaki spin that is more fine dining than Benihana. Although open just a week, the buzz surrounding the restaurant has been great, and I loved my dinner there, including a long list of only-at-Nobu sakes available no place else in the US. Many other local celebrity chefs have been pouring in to try the goods, including Gordon Ramsay, who has a restaurant around the corner, and chef Hubert Keller of Fleur de Lys in San Francisco and Burger Bar here, who was eating at a nearby table when I dined there. The restaurant is also very well designed and beautiful, with paper lamps resembling jellyfish hanging from the ceiling and a wide variety of seating areas and options, all comfortable, with only round tables, creating more space than rows of the more common square versions. You can also sit at the sushi bar or a couple of long high kitchen tables overlooking the cooking, as well as the private teppanyaki room.

Pet peeves? Sure, I have some, as I’m extremely particular about luxury hotels. My biggest complaint is the ridiculous $15 per day charge for WiFi (at least it’s fast). This is probably the number one complaint of hotel guests worldwide, but the number of places actually charging is dropping fast, and while some high-end luxury hotels have held out – exactly the wrong places to be charging for WiFi to begin with – it has become virtually unheard of in new hotel openings at any price, and I suggest they drop it ASAP. I was not shocked when they put a shoeshine bag on my bed at turndown, since many top hotels such as Four Seasons routinely do that and offer overnight complimentary shoeshines, a nice touch. But I was shocked when I looked closely at the small print on the bag and found that the shoeshines were another $15. I’ve never seen that before. Finally, and it’s a very small point, I found it off putting that the faucets in the bathrooms are all reversed. At the sink, hot is to the right and cold left, the opposite of standard, and in the shower the rotating handle starts at scalding and gets colder from there, again the opposite. Once you get this figured out it is no big deal, but it seems weird and to make it worse, there are no markings or temperature indications at all.

Still, despite these small complaints, I have to say that after having stayed at just about every major hotel in town, Nobu Hotel is absolutely one of my favorites and I would gladly stay there again. The pros, especially by Las Vegas standards, far outweigh these few cons, and to recap, the major pros are: bigger and better rooms, much better check-in, check-out, and bell service, great location coupled with peaceful escapism, and one of the city’s best and hottest restaurants.

(I made my own arrangements to travel to Las Vegas to cover the USA Sevens rugby tournament and complete several dining assignments, but for the four nights lodging at the Nobu Hotel, I was a guest of Caesars Entertainment.)

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Nice article on Nobu. I come to Las Vegas 4-5 times a year and have found the Mandarin Oriental to be the bellweather of luxury hotels with the best service. When I get out of the limo I am handed the key to my room never having to see a check in line. The bell staff all know my name and they have my room preferences down as well. Quiet and serene but with City Center dining and casinos right outside. Prices are actually quite reasonable for a MO with many weekends getting the third day free.

Mark, Thanks for reading and writing! The MO, along with the just revamped Four Seasons, are definitely the top of the luxury heap in Vegas. But most travelers expect nothing less from these renowned top tier global luxe chains that also both happen to be non-gaming (ie, normal) hotels. What has proven far more difficult for Vegas hoteliers is to try bringing that level of white glove service into the casino. Cheers!

I spent four days at Nobu. First of all no lobby, no pool, no breakfast at Nobu restaurant, restaurant as expected great food but very noisy. All in all not worth the price in my book. Rather stay at Tower Suites.

Larry, I’m sorry you didn’t like your experience, and you should stay wherever you enjoy most, but to clarify for others, Nobu Hotel has its own check-in check out “desk” at its private elevator lobby. While not a traditional hotel lobby, Caesars has that in plentitude just a few steps away. The whole point is to bypass the crowded lobby for this one on one express service. Caesars Palace, of which Nobu Hotel is part, has one of the largest arrays of pools, both for families and adults only, cabanas and all, of any resort anywhere. You have to go outside to the pools to use them, like just about every hotel in Vegas, but they are there, many of them, in a huge way. There is so much pool it is hard to imagine you missed it. Breakfast at Nobu is not included in rates – very few American hotels include breakfast – you have to order it to your room and pay for it, but they certainly have it, and are getting great acclaim for their Japanese take on bagel with smoked salmon. And yes, the restaurant is busy and loud, but this is Vegas, and I ate there and the food was excellent.

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